Monash HASS Delegation Visits Warwick to Advance Public Engagement Collaboration
From 12-16 October 2026 a delegation from Monash University visited the 91影视破解版 for a week-long visit aimed at strengthening collaboration in and learning on public engagement across humanities, arts and social sciences (HASS) subjects across the two institutions and beyond.
Professors Jo Winning and Catherine Mills joined Prof Helen Wheatley and Dr James Hodkinson of the Warwick Institute of Engagement (WIE) for Phase 2 of the 'Towards Permeability: Understanding the Impact of Public Engagement in the Hass Disciplines' project Funded by the Monash-Warwick Alliance and hosted by WIE. The visit combined sharing sessions on current engagement projects with cross-faculty discussions about institutional strategy, drop-in network sessions, and planning work for joint research and funding bids.
The programme opened with 鈥楥onnecting Hemispheres: Cultures of Research and Engagement at Warwick and Monash鈥�. In this cross-faculty sharing forum, Jo Winning and Catherine Mills presented public engagement work against the landscape of Monash鈥檚 research culture. A series of colleagues from Warwick then presented case studies examining topics as diverse as community鈥搖niversity partnerships in the West Midlands (Dr Becky Morris); engagement in history and the Mapping Women鈥檚 Suffrage project (Dr Tara Morton); uses of research on ageing and time in literature to help dementia sufferers (Prof Liz Barry; multilingual participation and translation (Dr David Orrego-Carmona); creative approaches to climate-change education (Dr Rachel Turner-King); and the social impact of linguistic research (Dr Kieran File). The presentations illustrated the diverse ways HASS research addresses public concerns, brings benefits to communities and, increasingly, involves those communities as co-researchers. They also flagged the various similarities and differences between engagement practice in the two national contexts.
A strategic roundtable brought together colleagues from WIE and Warwick鈥檚 Faculties of Arts and Social Sciences. Discussions covered institutional research strengths and priorities, reflections on the first phase of the project in 2025 and learning from the current visit. A central question was how the faculties might work together more effectively on public engagement and involvement, and what appetite, capacity and mutual benefit existed for deeper collaboration. The meeting connected individual research initiatives with wider institutional strategies and the insights ploughed back into the group鈥檚 planning work.
The programme also comprised two planning sessions, one working towards funding the next phase of the project, considering both interim funding opportunities and a potentially larger Monash鈥揥arwick Alliance application and the other involving the preparation of a publishable, joint position paper. And the group visited the Exchange at the University of Birmingham, meeting its public programmes, culture and community engagement team to learn from approaches to engagement beyond Warwick.
In addition to mutual learning and planning work, then, and perhaps most crucially, the visit strengthened connections within the project team and between researchers and engagement leaders across the two universities, whilst also identifying concrete next steps. By bringing together research and engagement practice, institutional strategy and future project development, this visit advanced the partnership鈥檚 central ambition: to better understand how public engagement contributes to the public understanding of the value and impact of humanities, arts and social sciences research, and how our allied universities can support that contribution more effectively.